I found this site, run by the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center which shows recent sea level deviations at certain locations across the world compared to the 1993-1995 mean. Not all of the locations are up and running, but if you click on one that is it will show you the sea level height anomaly trend going back 10, 20, 25 years back or so, depending on when the site was initially started up and running. I have seen a lot of conflicting opinions on the comment section of this blog in regards to this subject.

As you can see, the deviations are quite variable. Most of the higher sea levels compared to the 1993-1995 mean were located in the western Pacific, western Atlantic and around Australia. The lower deviations were concentrated off of Scandinavia and the west coast of North America.

The cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has been at least partly responsible for the warming of surface waters over the northwestern/western Pacific. The warmer waters have caused a thermal expansion of the water and a resulting sea level rise. How much of the rise is due to that? I do not know. Here is a link to the latest global sea surface temperature anomalies.

A previous report in June from ScienceDaily suggested that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961-2003 were 50% larger than estimated in the 2007 IPCC report. Sea levels rose by 1.5 mm per year from 1961-2003 or a total of 2.5 inches in during the 42-year span.

Hurricane Katrina Flood damage in New Orleans, LA. Image courtesy NOAA.

Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote an excellent article Sunday about how global warming is being overblamed in regards to specific natural disasters. From what I see, a lot of this is being created by a thirsty, big headline seeking news media. Some global warming advocates are also guilty of this rush to judgement.

I am not saying that global warming is completely off the hook when it comes to some of these particular disasters, but there is just not nearly enough information (data) out there to link the two with certainty. Far from from it, at this early point in time. Ten, twenty, a hundred years from now maybe that will change, but who knows.

Achenbach uses the Katrina and Iowa floods as prime examples of the quick-to-blame global warming rational. (Read the article here)

Kerry Emanual, a climatologist from MIT and a subject of at least one of my previous blogs was quoted in the article, stating "Global warming increases the probability of floods and strong hurricanes and that is all you can say." Makes sense to me.

Achenbach seems to zero in on the rapid growth of human population as the main culprit to many of these disasters. What do you think?

Also, Ken Clark, our western forecast expert, who also regularly blogs here at AccuWeather.com voices his opinion on a new plastic bag bill in California. You can read it here.

The United States and Canada at night. Image courtesy of NASA.

Thinking that this would be an excellent conversation starter, I was asked to post a link to the recently released "first draft" of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States".

Since this is a first draft, we are asked not to cite or quote from the document. In addition to listing the expected impacts of climate change in the U.S., the document also goes over some of the things that society can do to respond to climate change and how we can adapt.

This document was prepared by an expert team of scientists and supporting professionals. Much of the information is based on existing, published peer-reviewed data found in scientific journals. The IPCC conclusions are also used.

The PDF is fairly long (give it a minute or so to download), but it is easy to read with lots of graphics. I do not know when the "final draft" will be made available.

Here is the link to the U.S. Climate Change Science Program site.

The public can review this draft and submit comments before the August 14th deadline. Here is that link.

Mount Rainier, Washington.

A new study from the University of Washington suggests that there is no clear evidence that human-induced global warming has caused a drop in 20th century snow levels and that the volcanic, mountain chain could enjoy a delay in the future effects of global warming, according to an article from the Seattle Times.

Here is a link to the powerpoint presentation of the study. By the way, the first picture of the man skiing up to the roof of that building was the same hotel I stayed at during a visit several years ago on Mount Rainier. I am pretty sure that is the Paridise Hotel. When we went in July there was still many patches of snow up to a foot deep all around the grounds of the hotel.

Cliff Mass, a University of Washington meteorologist and co-author of this study says that studying the snowpack trends depends greatly on which years are examined. Mass and colleagues tried to estimate snowpack before the 1950's, a decade where snow levels were unusually high and the reason why we see a greater than 30% drop off in snow pack over the second half of the century when you use that decade as the starting line.

Mass and his team used a measurement that did exist before the 1950s: The amount of water that flowed down streams as snow melted. The team determined that the drop in snowpack from the 1930's through present time was 23%. (The 1930's in the U.S. was a warm decade, but I do not know if that was the case in the Cascades. It would be nice to know what the percentage drop was when you start out in the 1900's, 1910's or 1920's as well.)

Mass and colleagues say that many of these changes in snowpack are attributable to shifting weather patterns driven by the Pacific Ocean, which is what we heard from the Mount Shasta glacier report I blogged about recently.

The team also noted that computer models predict that the northeast Pacific will warm more slowly than most of the world's oceans, keeping the average rain/snow level from gaining altitude
too quickly.

Not so fast!

Alan Hamlet, a University of Washington hydrologist, who co-authored a study on snowmelt hydrology in the mountainous West back in 2005 disagrees with Mass. Hamlet says the snowpack trends during the second half of the century are consistent with rising temperatures which are tied to global warming. He also criticizes some of the statistical analysis of the new study co-authored by Mass.

You can read more about this story here..

The Arctic has now reached the peak of the summer melt season and scientists now predict that the 2008 sea ice extent will most likely not break the record low minimum set in 2007, but it will still end up well-below normal with a minimum sea-ice extent less than 2005, which right now stands as the second lowest extent on record.

The latest graph of the Arctic sea ice extent, courtesy of the NSIDC. Note: there has been a more sharp drop over the past several days. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues.

Scientists now give the chances of a new record sea-ice extent minimum being set in 2008 at 8%, according to the ScienceDaily article. But, a lot of the sea ice is still quite weak and thin and and a sudden, rapid melt off over the next month still cannot be totally ruled out.

The Graph below shows the latest Arctic sea ice extent forecast from the NSIDC on July 30th. Remember, this forecast was issued right before the latest downturn is sea ice extent.

The future of sea ice extent and thickness greatly depends on the weather (wind, clouds and air temperature) and scientists are studying these factors and utilizing new computer models to better predict the eventual outcome of the sea ice in the Arctic over the coming years.

Here are the July 2008 global temperature anomalies as measured by satellite using microwave soundings. The data is provided by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) using MSU and AMSU data. The below image shows the July temperature anomalies across the globe for the lower troposphere in degrees Kelvin. The reds and yellows indicate warmer-than-normal temperatures during the month of July, while the blues indicate cooler-than-normal conditions.

As you can see, the warmest temperatures compared to normal were found over central South America. Other above-normal areas included Atlantic Canada and eastern Russia.

Temperatures were clearly below-normal over Alaska and the Yukon Territory, aso over the far southern oceans.

Here are some specific numbers (temperature anomalies) for July.....

Global land and sea combined: +0.147 degrees Kelvin, making it the warmest month compared to normal since October of 2007, but still cooler than the past three July's.
Northern hemisphere: +0.258 K
Southern hemisphere: +0.031 K
Continental U.S.: +0.340 K

Acknowledgement

MSU/AMSU data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems and sponsored by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program. Data are available at www.remss.com.

In this week's Headline Earth video, host Katie Fehlinger interviews NOAA oceanographer Phyllis Stabeno. Stabeno says that despite global warming, the Arctic will never be a "warm" place, but the loss of sea ice at certain times of the year will impact more animals than just the polar bear.

The eye of Hurricane Wilma from space.

A new study by researchers from NOAA goes even further in the latest argument that rising ocean temperatures due to global warming will not produce more hurricanes.

Going back to 1878 data, storm numbers have supposedly increased at a rate of 3.8 per century, but the pre-World War II data has many inaccuracies, since the numbers were based on ship observations.

In order to correct for these inaccuracies, Gabriel Vecchi and Thomas Knutson of NOAA tried to superimpose known storm tracks from 1965 to present over known ship tracks from 1878-1965. The duo determined that ships indeed missed many storms, especially during the early years (19th century) compared to the 1960's and that those early ships probably missed about 1/3 of the storms.

Adding that 1/3 to the official record yields a nearly flat trend in storm frequency from 1878-2006 despite a rise in ocean surface temperature of 0.7 celsius.

This study was published in the Journal of Climate.

A USGS crew evaluating forest thinning one year after a late-season burn.

The current policy of wildfire management by supressing small fires is causing less carbon to be stored in trees, according to a new study from the University of California.

The research team, led by Michael Goulden found that during the period from the 1930's to the 1990's mid-altitude conifer forests increased in area by 34%, but contrary to the conventional wisdom that more trees mean additional carbon storage- they found that the amount of stored carbon actually diminished by 26% during the same period, according to the Scientific American article.

Current wildfire policy is to stop more ground blazes, which is preserving more and more small-sized trees which hold much less carbon compared to bigger, more mature trees.

Potential Solution?

Preserving the heftier trees is the easy solution to augmenting carbon storage and allowing them to play their ecological roles, says Nathan Stephenson, an ecologist from the U.S. Geological Survey.

As the climate changes and puts stress on plant life, Stephenson says, it is probably better for the forest to get back to the way it used to look: thinner and less crowded. In fact, the national parks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with which he closely works, already use prescribed fire to thin forests. Burning or cutting down trees will release some carbon into the atmosphere. But at least, Stephenson notes, “you reduce the chance that you’re going to lose all [the carbon] in a catastrophic wildfire.”

Note: The previous two paragraphs are exerpts from the Scientific American article.

As I noted last week, the National Sea Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has now confirmed that the pace of sea ice loss in the Arctic basin sharply quickened over the last ten days. That latest updated graph below does seem to indicate that that the trend over the last two days might have begun to resume a more normal trend, but I think they will need another week of data to confirm that.

The big question was why did we see this sudden drop off of ice coverage? According to the NSIDC, a series of strong storms helped trigger warm, southerly winds which broke up thin ice in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. Looking at the sea level pressure map below for Aug 6th, 2008, you can see the large area of low pressure extending north from Siberia, the counter-clockwise flow around the low pressure produced the stronger southerly winds, especially over the Chukchi Sea. You can also see the large area of high pressure centered over Greenland. The clockwise flow around the high also produced southerly winds up through far northern Canada. By the way, that same pattern forced the chilly air that you normally see in northern Canada much farther to the south, resulting in the unusually cool and wet pattern that we have been seeing over eastern Canada, the Great Lakes and the Northeast U.S.

Northwest Passage opening up again

Just like last year, the famous Northwest Passage is opening up once again. Check out the August 10th satellite-microwave image of that region below. According to the NSIDC, just a small section of sea ice was blocking the route as of a few days ago, but that was expected to melt off fairly quickly.

Just FYI, here is the latest Arctic region sea-ice concentration map from the University of Bremen (Aug 12th)....

On a few occasions in the past I have blogged about cows and their belching of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, but there is much less of it in the atmosphere compared to carbon dioxide.

Anyway, in sort of a follow up to that subject, researchers in Australia have come up with a possible solution (at least in Australia) to this problem. Instead of eating beef, the researchers suggest that Australians should opt for kangaroo meat instead.

According to the study, kangaroos, the national animal of Australia produce no methane through their flatulence since the bacteria in their stomachs makes their digestive process much more efficient. The scientists are also looking at ways to transfer the kangaroo bacteria to cattle and sheep.

In the meantime, if "farmed" kangaroos can replace cows and sheep, farmers will save millions in feed costs and Australia could see a significant drop in greenhouse emissions. The country already produces 30 million farmed kangaroos in the outback.

"Fourteen percent of emissions from all sources in Australia is from enteric methane from cattle and sheep," said Athol Klieve, a senior research scientist with the Queensland state government. In New Zealand, that number could be as high as 50%.

Anyone ever had kangaroo meat before?

Here is the link to the article.

In this week's Headline Earth video, host Katie Fehlinger shows us how research vessel trips to the Bering Sea get started and some of the things that scientists are measuring in those cold waters off of Alaska.

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has just released their offical global temperature anomaly data for July, 2008.

According to the NCDC, the combined global land and sea surface temperature anomaly for the month of July was +0.49 Celsius or +0.88 F. This makes July, 2008 the fifth warmest July on record, going back to 1880. The results were based on the Smith & Reynolds temperature anomaly analysis.

Here is our favorite dot map. Once again, the reds far outnumber the blues.

Here is the updated July land/ocean surface temperature anomaly graph going back to 1880. Smith and Reynolds analysis.

The below image shows the average sea surface temperature anomalies during a week period in the middle of July.

The below image shows the average sea surface temperatures across the globe last week. Can you see any changes?

By the way, the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for the globe was +0.06 C/ +0.11 F, making this past July the 15th warmest over the past 30 years based on this particular satellite measurement. Keep in mind, the Smith and Reynolds analysis takes into account record that go back 128 years.

Dr. James Hansen, who is the head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) recently spoke to House Select Committee back in June, which was exactly 20 years after he first testified to Congress about the dangers of global warming. I blogged about that story on June 25th. As I expected, there was a fair amount of sharp criticism about his speech in the commentary section of this blog.

In a recent post (pages 11-18) (Aug 4th) on his Columbia University website James Hansen discusses how he was bombarded with critical emails after that speech. I wonder if any of those came from some of our regular commentators?

Anyway, Hansen explains that a majority of the critical emails insisted that the sun, not man, was the primary cause of climate change.

In his response, Hansen explains why these ideas about sun and climate change are wrong and that speculation that we may have entered a solar driven long-term cooling trend must be dismissed as a pipedream as the solar signal in shorter term global temperature is too weak. See next paragraph.

The text below is directly taken from Hansen's post:

Solar irradiance seems to be slightly less at its current minimum than in earlier minima (Figure 6), but, at most, the decrease from the mean irradiance of recent decades is ~0.1% yielding a climate forcing of about -0.2 W/m2. The current rate of atmospheric CO2 increase is ~2 ppm/year, yielding an annual increase of climate forcing of about +0.03 W/m2 per year. Thus if the sun remains "out", i.e., stuck for a long period in the current solar minimum, it can offset only about 7 years of CO2 increase. The human-made greenhouse gas climate forcing is now relentlessly, monotonically, increasing at a rate that overwhelms variability of natural climate forcings.

Hansen also tries to explain how science really works and admits that scientists may not fare very well against contrarians in you-tube style debates. Now you know why he may not be too keen about debating.

Hansen includes a few of the critical emails within the sources section at the bottom of the last page. I just touched upon his response, once again, there is a lot more detail between pages 11-18 in his post if you are interested.

A closeup of a stalagmite. Image courtesy of NOAA.

A West Virginia cave stalagmite has provided the most detailed geological record to date on climate cycles in eastern North America over the past 7,000 years, according to a ScienceDaily article.

Gregory Springer, a geologist from Ohio University and his team examined the trace metal strontium in the stalagmite. The stalagmite was able to preserve climate conditions averaged over periods as brief as a few years.

Through their study of the stalagmite, the team determined that there were 7 major drought periods during the Holocene era, which started about 10,000 years ago.

"This really nails down the idea of solar influence on continental drought," said Springer.

Geologist Gerald Bond suggested that every 1,500 years, weak solar activity caused by fluctuations in the sun's magnetic fields cools the North Atlantic Ocean and creates more icebergs and ice rafting, or the movement of sediment to ocean floors. The data from this study is consistent with the Bond events, which showed the connection between weak solar activity and ice rafting, according to the researchers.

Though modern records show that a cooling North Atlantic Ocean actually increases moisture and precipitation, the historic climate events were different, Springer said. In the past, the tropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean also grew colder, creating a drier climate and prompting the series of droughts, he explained.

The climate record found in the stalagmite suggests that North America could face another major drought in the next 500 to 1,000 years, but according to Springer, global warming could offset the cycle.

"Global warming will leave things like this in the dust. The natural oscillations here are nothing like what we would expect to see with global warming," he said

The findings of this study were posted in the Journal of Geophysical Research Letters.

Images courtesy of the University of Bremen, Germany.

Arctic sea ice concentration Aug 20th, 2007

Arctic sea ice concentration Aug 19th, 2008, accounting for leap year. (Thanks to Anthony Watts, I would never of thought of the leap year day difference)

Here is what I see...........

1. There is clearly more sea ice on the Siberian side of the Arctic this year compared to last year at this time.

2. But, there is clearly less ice this year compared to last year at this time on the Alaska side of the Arctic.

3. There is in general a higher concentration (purple color) of sea ice this year compared to last year at this time in the region more closely surrounding the pole. But, you can see two wedges of less concentrated ice trying to get close to the pole this year, one thin one on the siberian side and a much bigger wedge on the Alaska side.

ANTARCTIC

Antarctic sea ice concentration Aug 20th, 2007

Antarctic sea ice concentration Aug 19th, 2008 (again, accounting for leap year)

1. The thing that sticks out to me is the reduction in sea ice concentration ( more reds/yellows)compared to last year at this time on the eastern Atlantic side of Antarctica between 60 and 65 degrees south latitude. The general extent of ice looks fairly similar.

Ice extent graphs

Here is the latest sea ice extent graph from the NSIDC. It is still closing in on last year's low, but I think it will come up a bit short of that record. Still, a few more weeks of melting.

Here is the link to the latest Arctic sea ice area graph from the University of Illinois at Champaign. Their version also indicates a continuation of the steady decrease in area. Now it has just about reached 2 million sq/km below normal. Last year at this time it looks like it was about 2.25 million sq/km below normal.

Fay is one stubborn storm!

I figure no time is better than this to have one of my open forums. I have been extremely busy over the past couple of days in dealing with tropical storm Fay down in Florida. My other job here at AccuWeather is being the afternoon southeastern radio forecaster. I will have a fresh post up by tomorrow.

Please try to keep your comments related to climate change.

An icebreaker leaves behind a wake of broken sea ice.

A 6-year study of Arctic sea ice confirms that there has been a massive shrinking and drastic thinning of the ice.

Highly accurate data, which was gathered on board a German icebreaker over several seasons has shown that sea ice in the Arctic has thinned up to 53% from 2001-2007, according to a University of Alberta study led by earth and atmospheric sciences Professor Christian Hass.

Sea ice that was once 2.5 meters thick in 1991 is now 0.9 meters thick.

Haas notes that the thinning is not only due to melt, but also to the replacement of older, thicker ice by relatively thin first-year ice. The regime change is due to faster ice motion, supported by the thinner ice.

According to Haas, the observed thinning is a signal of climate change, but he notes it is still unclear what the underlying mechanisms are.

"The faster ice motion is due to changes in atmospheric circulation patterns. The independent thinning is due to increased oceanic and atmospheric heat fluxes, and it is likely those atmospheric heat fluxes, like higher air temperature and increased infrared radiation, are the major causes."

The previous three paragraphs were taken directly from the University of Alberta news story.

By the way, earlier this spring, new data obtained by Hass indicated that there would not be a new record minimum ice coverage this year.

I thank Steve Bloom for directing me to this article.

Headline Earth's Katie Fehlinger discusses how a shift in the Bering Sea's system is impacting the fish and the fishing industry up there.

Research Tents on the Petermann Glacier. Image courtesy of NASA.

Two of the largest floating glaciers in northern Greenland recently broke away as evidenced by satellite imagery. See this link to the photos.

An 11 square mile (1/2 the size of Manhattan) piece of the floating Petermann Glacier in Greenland broke away some time in the middle of July. According to the ScienceDaily article that same glacier lost a piece 3X bigger between 2000 and 2001.

Researchers from the Ohio State University also noted a massive crack further back from the margin of the Petermann Glacier which could signal a much larger breakup.

Meanwhile, the margin of the massive Jakobshavn glacier has retreated inland further than it has at any time in the past 150 years it has been observed. Researchers believe that the glacier has not retreated to where it is now in at least the last 4,000 to 6,000 years.

Beautiful photography!...........

Jason Box, professor of Geography from Ohio State has some really sharp pictures and video of glaciers across Greenland. You can check it out right here.

I recently found this site which shows a very detailed satellite analysis of global sea surface temperatures. The sight also shows the sea surface temperature anomalies compared to the 1971-2000 base period. What I like about this analysis compared to the ones I have used in the past is that the "normal" zones are much more visible. With the old maps it almost seemed like you were looking at anomalies that were either above or below and nothing in between.

Let's compare the latest anomaly to the past two years (data only goes back to 2006) on the same date........

August 24th, 2008

August 24th, 2007

August 24th, 2006

Some of my own observations:

--In the equatorial Pacific you can see notable changes over the past two years...Currently, the el nino southern Oscillation (ENSO) is neutral, and you can see that by the analysis. Last year at this time, there was clearly a band of cooler water compared to normal off of South America into the equatorial Pacific, which is indicative of La Nina ENSO conditions. In August of 2006, the water stretching out into the equatorial Pacific was warmer than normal, indicating a weak El Nino look.

--There is a large area of warmer than normal sea surface water over the northwest Pacific currently. That was also evident back in August of 2006. Also, note the large pocket of cooler water over the central Pacific and along the west coast of Canada which resembles the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

--Currently, much of the Atlantic tropical cyclone breeding ground region is experiencing slightly warmer to near-normal sea surface temperatures.

I saw this article a few days ago from the BBC. The article " World heading towards cooler 2008" talks about how temperatures the first half of this have run about 0.1 degrees Celsius cooler than any year this century. Why is that?

Well, scientists from the UK Met office say that the main reason for this cooling is La Nina. If you do not know, La Nina is the cool phase of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is the unusual cooling of the sea surface water out in the equatorial Pacific.

But for those who are rooting for an ice age, don't get too excited. La Nina has faded for now and the ENSO is fairly neutral, so global temperatures will be rising again, according to Met office scientists.

Even though 2008 may indeed end up as the coolest year this century, the century is only eight years old and 2008 is predicted by the UK Met to be about the 10th warmest on record since 1850.

The article also mentioned the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and how some scientists earlier this year predicted that the current phase would hold temperatures in check for the next decade followed by renewed warming as the oscillation reverses.

Here is the latest update on the current status of the ENSO.

The graph below shows the latest model ENSO forecasts through early 2009. The consensus seems to go with near-neutral conditions into next spring.

A high resolution satellite image of Greenland.

Researchers from the University of Bristol in England have determined that the only thing that can explain the transition from a mostly ice-free Greenland 3 million years ago to the thick, ice-covered land mass that we see today is a drop in atmospheric CO2 (carbon dioxide).

According to the University of Bristol press release, 3 million years ago there was a notable increase in rock/debris on the ocean floor surrounding Greenland. The rocks could not have gotten there until icebergs started to form and transport them, which tells the scientists that the transition started around 3 million years ago.

Using climate and ice-sheet modeling, the researchers showed that the dominant cause of the Greenland glacification was the fall from high atmospheric CO2 levels to levels closer to that of pre-industrial times. Today, atmospheric CO2 levels are approaching levels that existed while Greenland was mosly ice-free.

The one question that scientists do not know the answer to is why was there a sudden drop in atmospheric CO2 three million years ago?

Here is the latest graph of the Arctic sea ice extent as of yesterday, courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). As you can see, the current sea ice extent is getting awfully close to last year's record minimum and was still dropping. Last month, I did not expect it to get this close, but I am certainly no expert when it comes to the behavior of sea ice.

As I recall, the record minimum last year was reached during the second week in September and the drop in sea ice normally begins to level off right around the start of September.

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Here are the latest visuals of the sea ice in the Arctic, courtesy of the University of Bremen, Germany. The first image is from Aug 29th, 2007 and the second image is the latest one from Aug 28th, 2008 (factoring in the leap year).

Even though the total extent of sea ice is fairly close to that of last year, the overall look is very different. Last year, we saw a lot of melting on the Siberian side, while this year mostof the melting has been on the Alaska side.